Small Is ... festival 2010
A great time was had by all!
The 2010 Small is ... Festival was an absolute success! Each stand was buzzing with interest and the weather was generally lovely. Thank you to all who attended, see you next year! Here are a selection of photos from this year's festival.
Andrew Simms - "The Great Transition: economics without growth"
On the Saturday morning, in a session chaired by Patrick Mulvany, Andrew Simms, the Policy Director of the Schumacher-inspired new economics foundation spoke about how we can make the necessary 'Great Transition' to a zero growth economy while increasing our 'well being' and sustaining our unique and fragile planet.
Listen as MP3 or Windows Media (It would have been better as a video… and we could all have savoured the shorts, shirt and the ‘Giant Vampire Squid’!)
Andrew, the former Policy Director of the Schumacher-inspired New Economics Foundation (nef), has a distinguished history of work on the key environmental and economic issues of the day (see www.neweconomics.org/about/andrew-simms).
Before working at nef, Andrew was a policy officer at Christian Aid and authoured a highly acclaimed and cited report “Selling Suicide - farming, false promises and genetic engineering in developing countries”, which informed our precautionary agricultural biodiversity and biotechnology policy, approved by our Trustees a decade ago.
Andrew’s talk at our Festival focused on the impossibility of maintaining growth in our unique and fragile planet and that transitioning to a more equitable zero growth economy is possible and necessary “…we can do this…and the money is there if you just reorient production and government priorities”. Many apposite Herman Daly quotes and listen out for the story of ‘Impossible Hamster’ (also see a 1 minute clip on YouTube).
He gave a lot of emphasis to the ‘well being’ that can be achieved in this transition process and ended with a quote from a speech by the delightful and wise American environmentalist Edward Abbey:
"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."
- From a speech to environmentalists in Missoula, Montana, and in Colorado, which was published in High Country News, (24 September 1976), under the title "Joy, Shipmates, Joy!", as quoted in Saving Nature's Legacy : Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (1994) by Reed F. Noss, Allen Y. Cooperrider, and Rodger Schlickeisen, p. 338 ISBN 1559632488
nef publications on this issue are available on the nef website
Andrew also spoke at our Networking session on Food Sovereignty, chaired by Stuart Coupe. Some 85 people participated in this session on Saturday afternoon, at which we called on them to help us develop the food sovereignty movement in the UK.
Small Is ... on video
Adam Hart-Davis was among the speakers at this year's festival ...
... and Sebastian Wood, grandson of EF Schumacher ...
